July 25, 2017

How to Make Your Own Brushes in Photoshop (tutorial) + Skin Brushes Mini Pack!

It's only natural to feel the need to customize our brushes to fulfill our needs. Or even make our own from scratch! And that's what I've been doing lately. By doing so I came up with two brushes: one to blend the skin and another one to texturize it.

Here's another example of the brushes I made in action on my painting for this weekend's video.

I used the SkinBlend brush for the skin tones and the SkinTexture brush to mimic skin pores and for the glitter on the eyelid.

I've been really happy with them and if you wish to try them out you can download them from this DevianArt post.

Now for the tutorial!

How to Make Your Own Brushes in Photoshop

Step 1
Find a texture for your brush. Here I chose actual skin as my main purpose was to make some skin brushes. However, don't feel limited. You can pretty much make anything and turn it into a brush - drops of paint, scan some leaves, flowers... you name it - and load it into Photoshop and select the desired area with the Selection tool.

Step 2
Go to the Edit>Define Brush Preset and click Ok.

Step 3
Open your Brushes folder and there you will find the brush you've just made! You can stop here BUT- I highly suggest you move on to step 4.

Step 4
If you click on that little folder the arrow is pointing at, you will then be able to customize the brush you've just made (and others you may have). Explore along with the sliders and all the variables and try it along. When you feel happy with it, click on Create New Brush (third icon on the lower part of the opened window).

Step 5
In case you want to make a bundle out of all of the brushes you made or you simply would like to group your favorite brushes, you can go to your Brush folder's Preset Manager and select them by CTRL'ing them and save the set.